If English is your first language, you probably take it for granted that all website suffixes - the .com's, .org's, .gov's and the like - come nicely packaged in Western characters, like the ones you're reading now.

But what if you spoke only Arabic? Or Chinese? Or Russian?

All of those languages make use of a completely different alphabet. And, until this week, none of those alphabets could be used in place of the ".com" portion of an internet address.

Now they can. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced this week that the first sites with all-Arabic Web addresses are now online.

“This isn’t just a minor change for the Internet, it’s a seismic shift that will forever change the online landscape,” Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN, said in a written statement issued Thursday.

“This is the beginning of a transition that will make the Internet more accessible and user friendly to millions around the globe, regardless of where they live or what language they speak.”

The first of these internationalized suffixes is the Arabic form of ".masr," which means "Egypt."

Egypt's internet suffix now will look like this: .eg or .مصر

The Arabic characters read right to left.

This may not sound like a big deal from a Western perspective, but when you flip this scenario around, it's easier to understand, said Brad White, a spokesman for ICANN. Say you wanted to type in the Web address for Google.com, but, instead of .com, you had to type in equivalent letters from the Cyrillic alphabet.

"You may not have Russian characters on your keyboard," he said.

White said the switch is part of a long, technical transition to include non-Western characters. The foreign letters first showed up in the main piece of a Web address - so the "CNN" rather than the ".com." But completing the transition is important, he said.

So far, Chinese and Russian characters haven't been included. But 21 countries have applied to have domain name suffixes in 11 different languages. So you'll likely see more of these popping up online soon.

I don't claim to know much about Arabic culture but I can see that the people that decide to post on these blogs obviously don't either. It makes sense that any language be used for the "world wide web." English isn't the only language "world wide."

English should be the national Language of the world. It is the most widely spoken because America is still the dominant power in the world. If you go to someone else's country you best know their language but when you come here you dont need to learn english which is bs. We invented the internet and there needs to be standards. If you want to convert the page to display a different language fine, but the address should all be the same.

Forgive my lack of virulent enthusiasm on this topic but it seems like an only too blatant way for ICAAN to segment the market and establish additional revenue streams for their business model (I understand they are running out of distinct addresses and variations thereof to sell).

As an tech-junkie, I always thought the greatest accomplishment of the modern-day internet was accessibility to all, and the bringing of people from different parts of the world together, stimulating business, conversation and debate – in a common and universal language – english.

Just using the example above, will multinational businesses now have to purchase and maintain multiple language websites in different countries? How would the average consumer access these websites in other countries (given my keyboard cannot type arabic, hindi etc)? Would companies price products radically differently?

This can only lead to less freedom of information and the beginning of a chinese-styled internet walls, increased security barriers and (gasp) internet censoring.

This is something that finally makes sense and a long time coming. The web isn't all in English, just go look and you can find it in just about any language there is even a English to Pig-Latin translator out there. If one of the ideals this country was founded on was the free press and the free distribution of information, it's hypocritical for there not to be multi-language support for the internet. How else are we to get information into the hands of those in Sudan, or China or the Middle East for that matter. And for every example of a "Great Firewall of China" out there, there exists a way around it. There are always autonimizers and IP masking tools on the internet to get around just about any technology. And while it is a way for ICANN to make more money, why is it bad that companies like ICANN make money and that if banks don't make money, the whole system is going to collapse? Get real, ICANN is a business and needs to pay it's employees like any other one.

at other Joe,
English is considered the hardest language to learn, true it is widespread, but a worldwide language is just not feasible in this day and age. and no, America is not the dominant power in the world, they just think they are. Russia could SO whup you. I hate living here.

Scott that was funny!
You have been criticized by some people who find nothing wrong in a show ridiculing Jesus and Christianity but one single joke regarding a group of Middle Eastern people is OFF LIMITS and they belittle you by likening you to following a group of bison?

I am very supportive of multi-language support for the Internet, but something that is, and always will be, necessary in order for the Internet (or, more accurately in this case, the World Wide Web) to remain world-wide communication, is a common standard for getting to the pages. Are these modifications going to simply be use of all unicode characters in the URL (unicode has enough room for over 65000 characters, so I would think there should be enough space for us all), or will the syntax and format of the URL be changing as well? Obviously IP will still be used behind the scenes (hopefully someday we will all be using IPv6, it seems like it's been long enough), but we still need someone to translate from a domain name to an IP address for us. But back to the point. If different places are using different languages, different pages will need to be made for us (some data may come from the same databases, but still), so the chances of us all communicating and looking at the same stuff like we do now is not real likely to happen. Once again, I strongly support multi-language usage on the Internet and WWW, but here is my final question: URLs are rarely words anyway, and any computer can be used to enter any character (has anyone ever used Character Map?), so what does what language you know have to do with the URL?

This doesn't mean anything to those of us who only write/speak English. So what if they can type it in their own language, why DO YOU CARE?

For those in other countries, this is a good thing for them. How would you of liked to type .com in Chinese only all of these years? It does nothing, hurts nothing and those of you who are whining against it are ignorant.

For the record, I'm American, only speak English... I just happen to be educated and informed before I decide to flip out about something (unlike several people that have previously posted comments here).

This is a big step, as all world domain name owners have to compete for domains that do not necessarily cover their target audience. With this step, English speaking countries will have more domain choices available, as well as countries with different alphabets. Who cares, someone asked? The world.

Oh crap! Am I being non-PC by saying "It's Friday everyone" Because of course you probably suspect I'm an American. Afterall, it's already Saturday in some parts of the world. I mean good Lord....who do we Americans think we are, right? I want to be totally politically correct here......

My apologies to everyone who is not in the USA. I'm a total ignorant person.

"how ironic and uneducated this world getting ... EGYPT .. DOES NOT mean 'MASR' ... MASR is another name for the country .. EGYPT .. is 'ECIPT' or 'CIPT' the name of this country for 6 thousand years now."
---------
Wow, I thought I was the only one who knew that.

A correction for you – English is NOT the hardest language to learn. It does however have the most words (though most of us use and know only a small subset of these words). There are much harder languages out there, including Polish, Hungarian, and many of the asian languages.

This is a good thing for the non-English speaking world. The more others can communicate and pass on information in their own language the better for them. Anyone else will still be free to read it if you want. Just learn the language or get a decent translator. Detractors need to take their heads out of their colonial lower backs.

The internet was invented in swiss by a guy called Tim Berners Lee. Great American'S think they invented everything. Sorry, I don't wnat to put all US citizens in one pot, but ... come on, guys like you make me think America only consists of rednecks (either color ;))

Hahaha. I find these comments amusing. For all you people who know "how the world works" don't know jack and if anyone disagrees with you, they're automatically racists. It's kinda like the Anti-War people protest war yet never served a day in their lives. Can't protest it if you never participated first-hand.

Do you guys really not realize that people have already written blogs and created websites in Arabic?!!! They all already exist; now they just have another extension to add to that list – like .fam, .eg

I am very supportive of multi-language support for the Internet, but something that is, and always will be, necessary in order for the Internet (or, more accurately in this case, the World Wide Web) to remain world-wide communication, is a common standard for getting to the pages. Are these modifications going to simply be use of all unicode characters in the URL (unicode has enough room for over 65000 characters, so I would think there should be enough space for us all), or will the syntax and format of the URL be changing as well? Obviously IP will still be used behind the scenes (hopefully someday we will all be using IPv6, it seems like it's been long enough), but we still need someone to translate from a domain name to an IP address for us. But back to the point. If different places are using different languages, different pages will need to be made for us (some data may come from the same databases, but still), so the chances of us all communicating and looking at the same stuff like we do now is not real likely to happen. Once again, I strongly support multi-language usage on the Internet and WWW, but here is my final question: URLs are rarely words anyway, and any computer can be used to enter any character (has anyone ever used Character Map?), so what does what language you know have to do with the URL?

You said "English should be the national Language of the world. It is the most widely spoken because America is still the dominant power in the world."

However, but besides being wrong on just about everything else you said, you are also wrong on your comment about English being the most widely spoken language. In fact Chinese is the most widely spoken language.

From a technical and security standpoint it's a bad thing. Allowing full unicode addressing opens up the doors for all kinds of phishing attacks.

Back when computers were invented characters were mapped as single bytes. 7 or 8 bits. Before that it was baudot, 5 bits. For any non-kanji language 8 bits is usually plenty if all you're doing is your own character set. But nowhere near enough to encode all the character sets.

So, unicode expands the size of letters in memory to 16 bits, but in order to preserve character array sorting arithmetic rules in all languages, many western characters are duplicated repeatedly. Each looking the same but having a different code and thus being a different character so far as the computer is concerned.

Thus allowing people to register domains that look like, for example, cnn.com, but the C's aren't english ascii "c"s from the 8 bit western block but from somewhere off in 16 bit unicode and the site doesn't point to cnn at all.

Reading some comments show me how some are not educated and we are on the 21st century, didn't you know it called WWW "World Wide Web”? And not owned by country. Do you think any one wants to do a bad thing will wait be waiting for a new web names? , grow up people let us teach the extremist a word peace, the chain has to be broken somewhere.........

Hey, Todd just for your info: Middle East is also the home of millions of christians who are proud of their heritage as Christians. It happens I am one of them!!!! This is so sad that some people feel threatened just because of that! I live in America, my husband is American but there are other people out there who are smart, intellegent as well if not more...sorry, but your comment and others like you makes me feel wondering what is wrong with you guys? Why some of Americans are so isolated?

All I can say when I read through some of these blogs is that I get the same chills when I read about extremist 'pro-americans' than when I read about any other extremists of any kind in the world. But understanding the first kind is harder, provided in theory they have had more opportunities to be educated, see things for what they are and understand that before we are citizens of any country, we are all citizens of the 'world' and that entails variety in everything.

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